Eager to abandon the beefy, proletarian image that's dogged him since his TV-movie days, Nick Nolte occasionally takes acting roles that make him look like a St. Bernard in a poodle's sweater.

In "Lorenzo's Oil," he used an Italian accent that sounded like a cartoon voice by Mel Blanc and gesticulated like an agitated pizza chef in a slapstick comedy.

In "Jefferson in Paris," which opens today at the Regency 1, Nolte plays Thomas Jefferson, and interprets our third president in the stiff, overly modulated manner of historical dramas. Back straight, chin held high, Nolte elongates his vowels, rounds off his consonants and does his best to simulate a man of reflection and intellect.

Coiffed in a strawberry blond ponytail that makes him look like sitcom star Brett Butler, and surrounded by opulent sets and costumes that look like early bids for Oscar nominations, Nolte makes a noble, sympathetic effort to humanize a historical figure, but never manages to look anything other than tight, corseted and out of his element.

Directed by James Ivory, who teams again with producer Ismail Merchant and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, "Jefferson in Paris" is dull, sluggish and unfocused. Unlike the trio's most successful films ("A Room With a View," "Howards End" and "The Remains of the Day"), it's not based on a book, but on Jhabvala's lengthy research, and consequently lacks the organizing structure that a single literary source might have provided.

WELL-MANICURED TOES

Set in Paris from 1784 to 1789, when the recently widowed Jefferson was in his early 40s, and served as U.S. ambassador to France, "Jefferson in Paris" tries telling three or four stories at once, can't decide which is most important and winds up stubbing its well-manicured toes.

It's primarily a love story, about the future president and Maria Cosway (Greta Scacchi), an Anglo-Italian painter and mu

sician who's married to a flamboyant homosexual (Simon Callow), and provokes in Jefferson a devotion that's romantic, imaginary and doomed to fizzle.

It's mostly an occasion for Jefferson to sit at his writing desk -- using a contraption that creates duplicate copies of each letter -- and compose flowery letters about the war between his head and his heart. Even when he and Scacchi are together, they sound as if they were writing scented love poems: "You and I are alive and the earth belongs to the living," Nolte tells Scacchi, sounding like Robert Taylor in "Camille."

Scacchi's a terrific model for Jenny Beavan and John Bright's period costumes (she looks like an expensive antique doll), but her acting can't match that of Emma Thompson, who starred in the last two Merchant-Ivory enterprises. What's more, her fruity, annoying accent seems to stretch all over the planet and her scenes with Nolte fall flat.

When "Jefferson in Paris" isn't looking at the Jefferson-Cosway connection, it burbles off in two or three other directions: It's also a tale of loneliness and cultural displacement, and the adjustments a foreigner makes in a new country; a peek at France just before the Revolution, when the aristocracy barely noticed the peasant class; and an argument against slavery.

When Jefferson arrives in Paris, he's accompanied by his sallow, depressive daughter Patsy (Gwyneth Paltrow), and by one of his slaves, James Hemings (Seth Gilliam). When James learns that French workers earn money for their efforts, he requests a salary, gets it and ultimately decides to remain in France instead of returning to bondage at Jefferson's Monticello home. Jefferson, who reportedly owned more than 100 slaves, many inherited from his father-in-law, justifies his ownership by calling slaves "intimate members of our family." The point, it seems, is that racism runs so deep in the American character that even a figure as enlightened as Jefferson -- he drafted the Declaration of Independence, after all -- could embrace it without question.

That's a good point, but by turning the slavery issue into an intellectual side dish -- and setting it in France, where it exists only as conversational fodder for curious aristocrats -- "Jefferson in Paris" cheapens the debate and makes it feel throwaway and abstract.

MISCHIEVOUS GLINT

"Jefferson in Paris" picks up steam when Hemings' sister, Sally (Thandie Newton), arrives from the United States and distracts Jefferson from the prissy, lovesick Mrs. Cosway. Newton has a mischievous glint and gives a charge to her scenes with Nolte and Paltrow. She and Callow, who carries on like Aunt Pittypat from "Gone With the Wind" in his brief scenes, are the only ones who manage to have a good time here.

Had Newton been given a chance, she might have saved "Jefferson in Paris" from its leaden pace and history-as-medicine tone. But she and Nolte have no love scenes, and the passion their characters are supposed to have shared in real life is only hinted at in Newton's eyes, and symbolized in one telling moment: Sally's removal of her "massah's" boot.

Sally Hemings, the illegitimate, one- quarter-black daughter of Jefferson's father-in-law, eventually returned to Monticello with Jefferson. She gave birth to six of his children, all born into slavery, and yet remains absent from most history books.

Had the Merchant-Ivory team chosen to make that forbidden, mixed-race love their focus, and not gotten sidetracked with all of Jefferson's silly mooning over the pretentious Maria Cosway, then "Jefferson in Paris" might have come to life.